Hands-on with the first Nintendo 3DS demo titles

Although it won’t hit stores until March 2011, the Nintendo 3DS already boasts a healthy software lineup that will take advantage of the device’s capabilities.

Games and proof-of-concept demos on display at the Electronic Entertainment Expo last week showed off the massive potential of the upcoming 3D handheld gaming system.In the hands of the right developers, the device’s promising 3D camera and motion controls can combine to form a whole range of unique experiences.

Nintendo’s massive E3 display here housed dozens of new demos, and Wired conducted a whirlwind tour of the area. To keep the huge line of gamers that snaked around the company’s booth moving quickly through, all the demos were very short or non-interactive. Here's what we saw.

Kingdom Hearts 3D

Square Enix is about to launch a new game in its Disney crossover Kingdom Hearts series on the PSP, and announced another game for the current Nintendo DS platform at E3. But that’s not enough, apparently, and a separate Kingdom Hearts is on the way for 3DS.

A brief, unplayable demo shown at the Nintendo booth featured scenes we’ve seen in earlier games, which would seem to indicate this is a remake of an existing title. But series director Tetsuya Nomura told Siliconera at E3 that it’ll be a new Kingdom Hearts title, “probably” developed by the PSP team.

That “probably” would be your indication that this is vaporware, if it doesn’t even have a proper development team yet. Don’t hold your breath!

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D

This game, a remake of the beloved 1998 Nintendo 64 adventure, was not on the E3 show floor. Instead, Nintendo showed it at a private roundtable event Tuesday evening.

Ocarina of Time is considered by many to be the finest Zelda ever, and producer Eiji Aonuma assured the crowd that the infamous Water Temple -- the most aggravating part of the original -- will be less frustrating in this remake.

The non-interactive demo of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D showed Link riding his horse, Epona, over Hyrule Field. (Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto said he wanted to remake this game on 3DS because he thought the wide-open plains of Hyrule would look beautiful in three dimensions.)

Paper Mario

The Paper Mario series of friendly, accessible role-playing games fits the 3DS perfectly, since the paper-thin cutout graphic style can easily be rendered with crisp depth definitions, like a shoebox diorama.

The non-interactive demo of the 3DS version at E3 showed a variety of scenes, battles and exploration, illustrating that the game is quite far along in development. The console versions have been uniformly excellent, so we’ve got high hopes for this one.

Star Fox 64 3D

Hey, a game that was actually playable! The first Star Fox was, for millions of gamers, the first polygonal 3D game they’d ever experienced. It’s fitting, then, that a remake of Star Fox 64 would be one of the first 3DS titles.

Star Fox 64 3D fits the 3DS like a glove. The device’s analog stick is great for controlling your ship. Most of the game’s levels involve flying straight ahead at automatic speed, making Star Fox 64 3D well-suited for portable gameplay. And since the graphic display is all about objects rushing from the background into the foreground, it’ll be a great way for early adopters to show off the system’s capabilities.

Pilotwings Resort

Here’s an odd smash-up of franchises. Pilotwings, a fun flight-sim series last heard from as a Nintendo 64 launch title in 1996, has been crossed with Wii Sports Resort.

Pilotwings Resort takes place on Wii Sports Resort’s tropical island, and uses Mii characters. Two styles of flight gameplay were shown at the E3 booth: Piloting an aeroplane through a series of rings, and flying a jetpack through the city while bursting giant balloons. This should be fun: Much like Star Fox, the gameplay lends itself well to the 3DS hardware.

Professor Layton and the Mask of Miracle

Note that Professor Layton and the Mask of Miracle is not the next game coming to the English-speaking world in the acclaimed puzzle series. That would be Professor Layton and the Unwound Future, which will be released for the current DS this September. No, Mask of Miracle is the fifth game in the series -- it’ll be a while before we’re playing it on these shores.

Mask of Miracle will be published by the new US office of its creator, Level-5, rather than by Nintendo. That’s why it showed up at E3 with this less-than-perfect translation, I’m guessing. The poorly constructed prose seen in this screengrab is one of the better passages in the demo. I hope Level-5 can polish the writing as well as Nintendo has in previous imports.

After four Layton games, fatigue is starting to set in, which is why I’m glad the series is moving to 3DS. Hopefully the upgraded graphics and functionality of the system will help the game design evolve. We got a very brief hands-on glimpse of how that might happen: Unlike previous games, you don’t click directly on the screen -- you drag the stylus around the touchscreen, but the cursor appears on the top screen. As the magnifying-glass cursor is dragged around, the perspective on the 3D town screen changes.

The one puzzle that was shown illustrated how the touchscreen and 3D screen will be used together. In the demo, you had to assemble a robot on the lower screen, then watch the parts come together in 3D on the top screen. (It wasn’t a very good puzzle.)

DJ Hero 3D

Activision’s abstract DJ Hero series makes a lot more sense for portable platforms than Guitar Hero, with its goofy guitar and drum controllers.

That said, there wasn’t much going on here that wouldn’t work on the current DS.

Various Tech Demos

In addition to the officially announced games in Nintendo’s E3 booth, the company showed a variety of tech demos. These could be expanded into full game concepts, released as downloadable 3DSWare games or shelved forever. I’m assuming we’ll see a few of them, as they were some of the more interesting projects on the floor.

The best ones employed augmented reality, using the 3DS’ outward-facing 3D camera to capture the real world around you and transform it into a backdrop for the game you’re playing. One game took a picture of your face, then turned you into a 3D enemy character. Faces flew all around, and you had to move the 3DS around to aim and shoot at them. Another game used a paper card laid on a table, then made a monster appear on top of it on the 3DS’ camera image.

Other proof-of-concept demos showed how stereoscopy could affect gameplay. A demo called 3D Jumper showed how depth perception made a simple platforming game much easier to play. 3D Challenge asked players to identify which of two images was 3D and which was flat.

It was clear Nintendo was attempting to keep the 3DS demos as brief as possible, either by whittling them down to minute-long gameplay experiences or by making them non-interactive. The point was to wow gamers with the technology while providing as few details as possible about the state of the product.